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It's not just the heart commitment. The piece of paper matters too.
I tracked down a quote that puts the whole thing in a nutshell for me. This from Charlotte Lopez (aka Charlotte Ayanna), who was Miss Teen USA in 1993 and was adopted at the age of 17 after spending most of her life in a series of foster homes:
"Clearly, the [foster family] never understood how important adoption was to me. They loved us. They wanted to keep us. They felt that was enough. I believe that their position was based on the notion--shared by many people involved in foster care--that adoption is pretty much an empty ritual, a bureaucratic step up from foster care with no deep meaning in and of itself. For me, nothing could have been further from the truth."
This is so right. Without that paper, I was never theirs, and they were never mine.
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